


Nothing but Stars

by versus_versus



Series: Made of Nebulas and Novas and Night Sky [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: (how is there not a tag for that...?), Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Fluff, It's Actually Fluff, Lady Knights of Ren, M/M, Shotgunning, Smoking, Tell me if I need other tags, The Knights of Ren are a half-assed band, don't do drugs kids, hell yes, pot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-22
Updated: 2016-02-22
Packaged: 2018-05-22 17:13:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6087844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/versus_versus/pseuds/versus_versus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To turn a trope in the kylux fandom on its head: what if Hux isn’t the one that smokes regularly?<br/>Featuring stoner!Kylo and a couple stoner!Knights of Ren. They're a band, and they might be halfway legit if they could just manage to, you know, record something.<br/>A college roommates AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing but Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for drugs and, if I get inspired/a bunch of feedback, possibly a follow up chapter with shenanigans. I just wanted an excuse to write more college AUs
> 
> Look, I’ve had to take people to the ER for drinking too much, but I’ve never had to save someone’s sorry ass for smoking too much. So this is me, your friendly neighborhood author, saying, “Don’t do drugs, kids.”

Hux came home from classes Friday afternoon feeling rumpled and stretched just a bit too thin. School was slowly fraying him around the edges, despite the clean-cut appearance he kept. His senior thesis really needed to be on Professor Daala’s desk a week from Monday, and although all that was left was proofreading and editing, he was feeling the pressure.

It didn’t help that his roommate was under next to no pressure at all. The asshole had finished almost all of his graduation requirements in three years, and the entirety of senior year had been him taking easy classes and trying to make his band, the ‘Knights of Ren’ work.

Bullshit. It was barely even a band. They sat around and played a bit of shitty music, maybe did a cover every once in awhile. They’d had a gig or two at the local bars, but for the most part, they were nobodies. Hell, Kylo still hadn’t even introduced him to them.

* * *

He found Kylo and his friends out on the back porch, smoking. 

Hux frowned at the smell and said, “Pot? Really?”

One of the women, an asian girl with dark eyes and her hair pulled back, looked up at him mildly. She sighed and looked to Kylo. “Looks like the parental unit is home. Should we go before he calls the cops?”

Kylo looked up at him mildly from where he was sprawled in a lawn chair, limbs everywhere. “You going to?”

Of course he wouldn’t, but that wasn’t how they saw him. They saw him as some kind of loser, too focused on a career and life to sit around and do nothing the way they did. “Whatever. Just…whatever. Don’t get the cops called on us, I don’t want to deal with that.”

“Nah.” The other guy had dark eyes and dark hair, with a deep olive skin tone. He shook his head and held out the joint in his hand to the other woman, a tiny little white girl with bright pink hair, letting her take a hit. “First off, nobody cares. Second, they’re not going to bust us unless we cause trouble and they actually want to bust us for something else.”

“Oh, I know. I’m just asking you not to do anything stupid.”

“Hey, it’s all good, I know how it is.” The guy plucked the joint back from the girl’s hand. She pouted as he took a hit.

“We’ll get you front row tickets someday!” the pink haired girl piped up.

“Whenever you get a gig, you do that. Maybe I can sell them and buy myself a drink,” he sniped back.

He heard her snort and giggle as he went back inside, and barely kept himself from rolling his eyes. They were immature. Flat out rude. Still, it stung a bit.

* * *

For some reason, Kylo followed him inside. He looked like he was on the verge of saying something, then turned to the pantry.

There was a thump and Kylo turned around, to find Hux angrily shuffling through his backpack. Kylo looked at him, controlling his expression before he could accidentally betray concern. “You alright?”

“Look, it’s fine.” Hux’s emotions tumbled in his chest. Something between them had been growing over the course of the year, and they’d both been avoiding talking about the occasional mutually drunken fumbles that had occurred. “I get that they’re your friends, but _you_ could at least not act like I don’t exist. I live here too. I have a right to exist within my own home, of all places.” He paused and looked up to see his roommate had a bag of chips tucked in the crook of his elbow and a gallon of sweet tea in his hand. He had an entire pack of oreos in his other hand and stared at Hux openly, as if surprised.

Hux changed topics, thinking he’d pissed Kylo off. “And for the record, you owe me for the oreos, they were supposed to be for my mentoring meeting last week but I couldn’t take a half-full pack…”

“What? Oh. I always thought…oh.” Kylo trailed off for a second, then seemed to brighten. “I’ll introduce you!”

“Wait, what?”

“I thought you were just annoyed with them being around and didn’t want anything to do with them.”

“I _am_ annoyed with them…”

“Come on. Meeting them will make it better. Here, have an oreo.”

“Those are already my...” Kylo shoved an oreo in his mouth and grabbed the package.

* * *

Hux found himself pushed back out toward the porch, nudged by the sweet tea in Kylo’s hand. He put things down on the small table and raised his hands, grabbing the other three’s attention. “I just realized I haven’t formally introduced you guys. This is my roommate, Brendol Hux.”

The first girl made a condescending noise. “Mmmm. Brendol. Thaaat sucks. Let me guess, you’re named after someone.”

Hux sighed. “I am. Got stuck with the ‘junior’ moniker.”

“Hey, I’m not judging, my parents named me _Tabitha_.” She said her own name with such condescension he thought she might choke on it. “It sounds so old, so…snooty and stuck up and…”

“It’s not that bad, I have an aunt named Tabitha, she’s amazing.”

She shot him a glare. “Yeah, whatever. I prefer Mags.”

“Nice to meet you.”

Mags’ eyes narrowed and she looked up at him with exaggerated suspicion. “You going to make me shake hands? Pretend like we’re adults at a country club? ‘Oh how do you dooo Jason, lovely to meet you.’”

“Hey, leave off the poor guy, he only just got home,” the guy said. He looked up at Hux and offered him a mild smile. "I'm Darien."

“Really? Come on, you guys know I’m just ribbing him.” She glanced up at Hux, daring him to contradict her. “Cause I would think you’re the kind of person who simply can’t relax. Like, ever.” She kicked her feet up on the railing and leaned back. “Right, Amy?”

The pink haired girl reddened, her cheeks going splotchy red with embarrassment as she halfheartedly shrugged. Kylo glanced at Hux, looking nervous. “Mags, for real…”

“No, really. We were just talking about him while you were inside.” Mags took a slow hit from the joint in her hand, balancing it with ease that put Hux in mind of Audrey Hepburn instead of a college student sitting on an apartment porch and getting high as hell. “Look, you know that phrase ‘if you shoved a piece of coal up your ass, in a week you’d have a diamond’? You’re the first person I’ve ever met that I’ve actually considered that being a very real possibility.”

“Oooh, bet you think you’re clever, don’t you?” Hux said, somehow maintaining his composure. She was trying to get a rise out of him. The best possible way to piss her off would be to maintain his composure.

Kylo sighed as he dropped back into his own lawn chair and shook his head. “Look, seriously, you two need to chill, this isn’t what…”

“Goody two-shoes to the maaaax.”

Hux glared at her and held out his hand. It’d been awhile, but enough was enough. She thought she had him backed into a corner, well, she’d see how well that worked.

She smirked and he knew he’d fooled her. She thought he’d fallen for her trap. It was simple: hook, line, and sinker. She held the joint out, everything about her posture smug, practically telegraphing the way she expected him to dissolve into a coughing, retching mess. Kylo started to hold a hand out as if to stop him, but Hux gave him a deadpan stare and thought _fuck it_.

The expression on Kylo’s face as Hux took a deep, practiced hit off of it was priceless. He held it, feeling the stinging sensation in the corners of his eyes before finally letting the smoke out in a long, slow breath. He held the joint between spindly fingers and fixed Mags with a look of disdain, pointedly ignoring Kylo’s upturned face. 

“It’s been awhile but really? You think I’m a ‘goody two-shoes’?”

Her expression slid from smug to surprised delight. “Ooooh, you’re a slippery one. I never would have guessed.” She nodded and made an approving noise. “I like him, he can stay.”

“Nah, I’ve got a couple things I need to take care of for work.”

“You just took a hit and you’re going to go _work_?”

“This ‘parental unit’ has shit he has to get done.” He tossed her words back at her. “Might come back out later though.”

Amy burst into giggles as he went inside. “Oh my god Mags I can’t believe you called him that. He’s never going to let you forget it.”

“I can still hear you, you know!”

* * *

He was unpacking his bag in the kitchen when Kylo came in and perched on one of the bar stools. “So. What was that?”

“What was what?”

Kylo fixed him with a dangerous stare. “You’re going to play dumb?”

He shrugged. “You don’t know nearly as much about me as you think you do.”

Kylo frowned at him intensely for a minute before finally wandering back outside.

Still, it wasn’t exactly a surprise that Kylo was back in the kitchen an hour and a half later trying to talk him into coming back outside. “You’d like them. Mags can be a bit…abrasive…but for the most part they’re pretty cool.”

“Abrasive? I can handle that, remember I hang out with Carol all the time.”

Kylo snorted at the thought of Carol Phasma being called ‘abrasive’ to her face. “Point taken.”

There was a quiet click of keys, lasting another two minutes as Kylo stood in the kitchen, sipping sweet tea from a plastic cup.

“Please?”

“Ok, alright, fine. Give me a minute to close things up.”

* * *

And that was how he found himself sitting around with a bunch of stoners. The hit from earlier had long since worn off, but they, for the most part, were relaxed to the point that he wasn’t worried about any possible social boundaries he might overstep.

Amy seemed to be the giggly sort, and a lightweight. She’d turned into a tiny bundle, wrapped up on Darien’s lap, giggling occasionally when Mags and Kylo would bicker. It was never malicious, simply good-natured disagreement. Darien was comparatively quiet, whispering almost everything he said like his own words were too loud.

Hux hesitated from guilt for a moment and then helped himself to a couple oreos. Hell, they were _his_ oreos, why had he even bothered feeling guilty? They talked, he listened, and somehow, he was content.

As the sun fell, another joint was passed around. In all reality, Hux had never seen a group of people relax quite like this. Somehow they were a team. A shitty team, one that had yet to actually record anything significant, but a team nonetheless.

Kylo leaned on the railing, picking at the paint with one hand. When he got the chance, he turned and offered it to Hux. “You want another hit?”

It didn’t seem too terrible an idea. Hux held out his hand, resigned.

“Actually,” instead of passing it to him, Kylo withdrew his hand. “You can just shotgun it.”

He laughed the comment off for a moment, but there was a weird twinge in his stomach as Hux realized he was serious. “You’ve _got_ to be joking.”

“Nope. I’m out after this.”

“That’s a pathetic excuse. Possibly the worst excuse I’ve ever heard.” He rolled his eyes and leaned forward as Kylo took a long drag, stooped to put his hands on each arm of the chair, and blew smoke lightly between his lips. Hux closed his eyes and breathed in, letting it settle in his lungs. 

He’d smoked with friends in high school, lighting up in a friend’s backyard on the weekends, trying to ease the sense of hyper-anxiety that came with his father’s expectations. He’d stopped once he was out of the house. There wasn’t anything complicated about it. He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d felt the need to prove himself earlier, but now that he was here, he decided he might as well savor it.

He opened his eyes to find that Kylo hadn’t moved. Instead, he stood there, his face inches away, his eyes flicking between Hux’s eyes and his lips. And _fuck_ he just wanted Kylo to lean forward and close the last few inches between them.

The edge they were balanced on was thin, too thin to stay balanced for longer than a moment. Just for a moment. For once Kylo seemed to have all the control he normally lacked. The one person Hux would easily describe as ‘irresponsible’ or ‘lacking restraint’ was _waiting to see his reaction_.

For the second time that day, Hux thought _fuck it_. So he kissed him.

* * *

It would have been so easy to get lost in the kiss, to take whatever he wanted from Kylo. For someone made up of awkward angles and muscle, his lips were awfully soft. For someone so stubborn, he simply yielded to what Hux gave him. It would have been so easy.

But instead, his train of thought was dragged off track by a voice saying, “Yeaaaahhhh get iiit.”

He broke off the kiss and Kylo’s eyes flickered open. He opened his mouth to say something, struggled for a second, and managed to whisper “Damn” in an almost reverent tone.

Mags grinned like it might break her face. “Shiiiiit Kylo, how long were you going to go without telling us?”

“Um…” 

Kylo straightened up, seemed to think better of it, then turned around and sat on Hux’s knees. Hux very nearly pushed him off, feeling heat creeping up his neck and realizing he needed to make a run for it before the blush spread to his face. “No, wait, I’ll move. We only have a couple of these chairs, both of us will probably break…”

Mags waved at him. “Man, shush. Can’t you see what you’ve done to the poor guy? The chair’ll be fine. Speaking of, you alright there Kylo?”

Her concern wasn’t entirely unfounded. He still looked a bit dazed. “I…think I’m higher than I meant to be.”

“I think you’re in love. Amy, Amy help me sing that song from The Little Mermaid.”

“Shut up Mags.” The two of them said it at the same time, prompting Amy to dissolve into a fit of giggles.

Kylo adjusted where he sat and seemed to snap out of it, shifting back into the conversation with Mags just as easily as before. Hux could feel the barest beginnings of the effects, and observed from a sort of outward viewpoint that despite being all limbs, Kylo wasn’t quite as awkward as he’d thought.

* * *

“Waaait wait wait…are you the kind of person who listens to music when you’re high?” Mags would not shut up. It was almost amusing, listening to her and Kylo go back and forth. He wasn't expected to interject particularly often, but she'd addressed the question to him.

Hux nodded. He was enjoying it, even if Kylo’s weight was gradually cutting off the circulation in his right foot. Even if he wasn't anywhere near a real high. What he was feeling was another sort of high, something unexpected but...welcome. Yes. Kylo’s weight was somehow comfortable, despite the pins and needles.

“What do you listen to?”

“Anything really. Not smooth jazz.”

She nodded, deeming his answer acceptable.

* * *

The others left not long after, once the sun had finally dropped below the horizon.

Hux found himself on the porch with Kylo, whose high was clearly fading. The easy relaxation that had accompanied it was waning, and he’d shifted from where he’d sat on Hux’s legs to another chair. When Hux rose, he looked up.

“You’re going inside?”

There was something in his voice. Hux couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but it was an unusual note he hadn’t heard before. “I should probably grab my laptop and keep editing my thesis.”

“Hm. You could do it tomorrow?”

“I know, it’s just…”

“I dunno, seems like a waste to go inside when it's finally this nice out.” He held up a lighter and another joint, neatly rolled. “I…might have lied, earlier, you know.”

Hux sighed outwardly, successfully hiding the amusement that seemed to catch hold of him at the thought of staying out, alone, with Kylo. “Why am I not surprised?”

“You want to talk about surprise? You hardly even hesitated to shotgun it. You do that with everyone, or is it just me?”

“Considering it’s been years, I think I can safely say you have nothing to worry about.”

Kylo gave him a look, as though contemplating the possibilities. “You could put your thesis off until tomorrow. I’ll even let you have the first hit.”

“I swear…” Hux took the proffered lighter. “You’re trouble.”

“I do my best.”

The lighter zinged worthlessly a couple times before finally catching. Kylo seemed a bit overly-interested in his hands, but he tried to ignore it as he took a long hit, finally breathing out and making a noncommittal noise as he passed it. “Mm. Alright, fine. That’s good.”

Kylo followed suit and settled back in the chair. “We’ll be out here every once in awhile. You know. Now that it’s spring.” He bit his lip and his words came out hesitant, almost stilted between the sentences, as if he weren't sure what to say next. “It's a good place to get together. But you could join us. You know. If you wanted.”

If someone had asked, Hux would have sworn he could hear that same tone in Kylo’s voice. “If I have time, I might take you up on that offer. No promises though.”

Silence fell entirely before Kylo took a deep breath and turned to him. “Why the _hell_ didn’t you tell me?”

“That I smoked back in school? Why would I?”

“I just…” he shook his head and slumped back in his chair. “I’ve never seen this side of you.”

“That’s because I make an effort not to come off that way to people.”

Kylo considered for a moment, then shook his head. “You’re full of surprises. I swear.”

“I thought you might have an aneurysm when I took that first hit.”

“You have no idea.” Kylo’s voice dropped a bit, rough around the edges.

“Oh, if your face was anything to judge by, I do.” Remembering his expression was enough to make Hux bold. He climbed to his feet, taking an expert hit as he put one knee on either side of Kylo’s legs and leaned forward to kiss him again, almost leisurely this time. He could feel the sting in the corners of his eyes, but more importantly, he could feel Kylo react to the kiss, breathing in long and slow. 

“Jesus.” Kylo coughed and shook his head as if to clear it when Hux finally broke the kiss. “That should be goddamn illegal.”

Hux raised the joint in his hand and shrugged. “ _Technically_ , it is.”

Kylo plucked it from his hand and discarded it in the tray on the ground, pulling him back down for another kiss without a second thought. The restraint he’d shown earlier was nearly gone, present only for a moment as he pressed Hux’s forehead to his own, trying to catch his breath. The sound that came out when Hux caught his mouth again and dragged the breath from his lungs was dangerously close to a moan.

The high finally set in and time seemed to slow. Details seemed to be picked out in impossibly high definition, catching his attention in a way he wanted to capture and somehow preserve. 

The feel of Kylo’s hands, sneaking up under his shirt and wrapping around his back. Limbs _too many goddamn limbs in the way why are we both so tall?_ taking up too much room in the chair. The chill of night air on the back of his neck as the last indigo faded from the sky, falling into the deep, endless black of space. The back of Kylo’s head bumping up against the railing as he tipped his head back for better access. Kylo’s lips pliable and heated on his own. _Oh goddamn._

Hux leaned back for a moment, nearly overwhelmed. The emotions that seemed to be trying to push their way out of his chest, the thrill of the outward sensations, everything seemed breathtakingly sublime.

Maybe it was the high, but he swore he could see nothing but stars.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't usually do fluff like this but my life needed some fluff. I can see it now, I'll die and when St Peter looks at my life he'll see I managed to write AU fanfic about mass murderers making out and smoking. So much sin without getting around to, you know, _sin_. Ah well. I've accepted my fate in the trash compactor.
> 
> I'm not saying I'm Mags but...she has a shipper's heart. The song she almost started singing was ‘Kiss the Girl’. Never let someone, drunk or high, sing that at you and someone else. Stop them at all costs.
> 
> Comments, questions, and feedback are always welcome!


End file.
